TESTIMONY OF A. M. EBERHARDT The testimony of A. M. Eberhardt was taken at 2:40 p.m., on March 25, 1964, in the office of the U.S. attorney, 301 Post Office Building, Bryan and Ervay Streets, Dallas, Tex., by Mr. Burt W. Griffin, assistant counsel of the President’s Commission. Mr. GRIFFIN. Let me state for the record, and also for your advice and information, my name is Burt Griffin and I am a member of the advisory staff of the General Counsel’s office of the President’s Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. This Commission has been set up by virtue of an Executive order of the President of the United States and a congressional resolution. The Executive order is Order No. 11130, which was issued on November 29, 1963, and the congressional resolution is Resolution No. 137. As a result of these two official acts, the Commission has promulgated a set of rules to conduct the proceedings, and in conformance with those rules and the Executive order and the congressional resolution, I have been designated to take a sworn deposition from you, Detective Eberhardt. Now, the general area of the investigation of the Commission is to ascertain, evaluate and report back to President Johnson on the facts relating to the assassination of President Kennedy and the later murder of Lee Oswald. In particular as to you, we are concerned about the events that led up to the death of Lee Oswald and most particularly about Jack Ruby, but we are concerned about anything else that you might have to offer the Commission that you think is pertinent. The Commission is not an investigatory agency in the sense that a grand jury is. We don’t have any authority to prosecute for any crimes. The only crime that could be committed in connection with this investigation that we can do anything about is perjury, and our primary concern in this matter is frankly one of national security and not prevention of crime. The most obvious thing is to learn how we can prevent the kind of things that have happened, well, since November 22, from recurring again, but it goes much further than that, because there are matters that transcend simply the protection of the President, there are problems, real problems of national security that are involved in this, and there are worries about it that are involved, too, because whenever you have the President murdered, you can’t exclude the possibility that there is some political group or even nonpolitical group interested in killing the President of the United States, and it is compounded when you find that the man that is charged with the murder of the President himself dies.